The Surveillance Trap: Why a Tech-Savvy Management Team is Reeling After Accidentally Proving That Every Employee Is Wasting Time
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In many countries, it is very difficult for a company to fire an employee, even when they aren’t doing their job very well.
That was the case at the company in this story, so when management wanted to fire someone who was a bad performer, they worked with HR to monitor his internet usage since they knew he surfed the internet for personal things at work. In order to avoid discrimination accusations, HR demanded that they monitor the internet usage of 10 other random employees.
When the results were generated, they found that while the bad employee was surfing the net a lot, the other 10 people were doing it even more. HR and the managers had to back down and couldn’t fire him for that.
Personally, I can’t believe that the company can’t just fire an employee who everyone knows isn’t performing well. Read the full story here and see what you think about it.
We need an excuse to fire him, check his internet usage…
This is more of failed attempt of HR being malicious with a sacking approach.
Rules like this can make things very difficult for a company.
In the UK, it’s not like in the US, you can’t just fire someone because you feel like it and with no warning.
About 15 years ago in an old office of mine, there was a guy who was pretty useless, but he was union and knew all the work arounds (eg “you’re not good at your job” “yeah well you need to give me proper training”, etc).
It really shouldn’t be that hard to fire someone who everyone knows is a bad employee.
Anyway, he was useless and lazy, so management and HR went through all the different ways to terminate his contract, but it took ages.
Eventually a new policy was introduced about abusing workplace internet usage for non-work related stuff (and it was a sackable offence).
Monitoring everyone equally makes sense.
Usage was unlimited at the time, but they were able to track time spent on non-work sites.
It was known that this guy used the internet for personal stuff, so HR said that to be fair and ensure he can’t counter the argument, that 10 other random people in the dept need to be checked over the same time period.
Honestly, maybe they should have fired everyone if they were just on the internet all day.
So, over the space of about a month, internet was monitored. From him plus the 10 random, although he used the internet a lot, he was by far the lowest user out of everyone they checked.
Needless to say, HR soon backed down on that approach, otherwise they’d have had to sack the entire dept! I think he finally got sacked for operating a his own business using work resources, but it took a long time!
Worker protections are good, but they often get abused by the employees who don’t want to do their job. In this case, it seems that the company should have been firing a lot more people and getting some workers in who would actually do their job.
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Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about this situation.
I wonder if this would work.
This would backfire on the owners.
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Poor performers can ruin a job.
This guy loves surfing the internet at work.
HR has to be careful when firing people.
This is why a company should be able to fire employees like this. I get that some companies will mistreat their employees, but when they can’t fire anyone, the whole place suffers.
An environment like the one in the story just pushes everyone to do as little work as possible, which isn’t good for anyone.
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